Tom Smith and Kevin Drumm - 2010 - Reconquer Sleep or Disappear

Savage Land – SL07  434.89MB FLAC

 Placed immediately after The Black Dog’s Sleep Deprivation, Reconquer Sleep or Disappear feels like the second half of an accidental commandment. The previous album entered exhaustion as a prolonged social and neurological condition, documenting what happens when work, travel, machines and anxious consciousness occupy hours once reserved for rest. Tom Smith and Kevin Drumm begin where that condition becomes territorial. Sleep is no longer something naturally awaiting the body at the end of the day. It has been invaded, lost and placed behind enemy lines. It must be reconquered. The alternative is not merely another tired morning. The title threatens disappearance, as though a person unable to reclaim unconsciousness will eventually be erased by continuous exposure to waking life.

The title is unusually severe even within the vocabulary of noise music. “Reconquer” implies that sleep once belonged to us, was taken away, and can be recovered only through force. It turns rest into contested land. This is not the gentle language of sleep hygiene, meditation or ambient reassurance. The sleeper becomes an insurgent attempting to retake an occupied inner country. Yet the word also contains a contradiction. Sleep cannot normally be conquered through effort. The harder one attempts to force it, the more conscious one becomes of remaining awake. The command to reconquer sleep may therefore guarantee the disappearance it is intended to prevent.

The cover presents the aftermath of that contradiction. A shattered pane of safety glass fills nearly the entire image, its surface divided into thousands of small interconnected cells. The glass has not fallen cleanly away. It remains suspended in a damaged state, holding the shape of transparency while no longer permitting an undisturbed view through it. Several zones appear crushed, folded or scraped across one another, producing a pale web that could be ice, circuitry, scar tissue, a microscopic image of cells under stress, or an aerial map of a city after catastrophe. The photograph does not show the impact that caused the damage. It shows a structure continuing after impact, technically intact but irreversibly reorganized.

That is precisely how this fifty-three-minute composition behaves. It does not simply attack the listener with uninterrupted volume, nor does it settle into one continuous drone. It presents sound after structural damage. Layers remain connected, but their relationships have become difficult to follow. Abrasive masses, suspended tones, electronic fragments, abrupt edits and stretches of unstable near-continuity form a single pane whose fractures are more active than its original surface. The music has not collapsed into randomness. It has acquired a new organization through breakage.

The recording history explains some of this internal complexity. Material was gathered over several years in Chicago, New York, Helsinki, Moscow and Hannover. These locations do not appear as documentary field recordings or distinct geographic chapters. They exist as separate temporal and spatial conditions compressed into one continuous block. A sound made in one city can be placed beside, beneath or inside a sound recorded years later somewhere else. Geography becomes montage. The final composition creates a city that does not exist on any map, constructed from rooms and electrical events that never originally shared the same air.

This makes the collaboration fundamentally different from two musicians meeting in a studio and documenting a single improvisation. Reconquer Sleep or Disappear is the product of accumulation, distance and retrospective construction. Smith and Drumm generated the material together, but Smith’s editing, mixing and production transformed those dispersed recordings into the finished architecture. The collaboration therefore contains two levels of time. There is the immediate time in which sounds were performed, and the much longer time in which those performances were selected, cut, layered, distorted and forced into relation.

Tom Smith’s history with To Live and Shave in L.A. is important here because his work has repeatedly challenged the idea that a recording should preserve a stable performance. Voice, electronics, rock instrumentation, studio debris and preexisting material can be sliced into dense discontinuities where expression survives only by moving faster than interpretation. His cut-up method does not treat editing as invisible repair. The edit becomes an audible act of aggression, a blade dividing time and welding incompatible moments together.

Kevin Drumm brings an almost opposite but complementary relationship with duration. His music can explode into harsh electronic saturation, but it can also remain inside static tone clusters, low drones and slowly mutating fields until apparent stillness becomes physically unstable. He has repeatedly demonstrated that a sustained sound is not a simple object. It contains grain, pressure, interference, microscopic rhythm and the possibility of catastrophe. Where Smith tends to make discontinuity feverishly visible, Drumm can allow change to occur so slowly that the listener notices it first as a bodily disturbance rather than a recognizable compositional event.

Reconquer Sleep or Disappear does not politely alternate between those identities. There is no Smith section followed by a Drumm section, no audible handshake between cut-up and drone. Their methods contaminate one another. Sustained material is attacked by edits; abrupt fragments become trapped inside longer fields; dense noise is interrupted without providing relief; quieter passages retain the expectation that the surface could rupture at any second. The composition occupies an unstable midpoint between collision and suspension.

This midpoint gives the work its unusual relationship with sleep. Falling asleep requires continuity. The body must be persuaded that the environment is safe enough for vigilance to weaken. Repetition, darkness and stable background sound can help consciousness surrender. Smith and Drumm repeatedly establish conditions that might permit such surrender, then introduce enough instability to keep the nervous system alert. A tone extends, but its internal pressure shifts. A dense field becomes almost meditative, but an edit exposes another layer beneath it. A quieter interval arrives, yet it feels less like rest than the silence of something preparing to strike.

The result resembles the involuntary listening that occurs during insomnia. Ordinary sounds acquire exaggerated significance. A refrigerator cycle, passing vehicle, pipe movement or distant voice may become impossible to ignore because the mind has no larger daytime structure within which to demote it. Reconquer Sleep or Disappear creates a comparable hierarchy collapse. Background and foreground continually exchange roles. A faint high frequency can become more threatening than a loud impact because it appears to continue indefinitely. A violent burst may almost provide relief because at least it has a defined beginning and ending.

The single-track format is essential. Fifty-three minutes without internal titles or official divisions deny the listener convenient exits. A multi-track album would allow each episode to become a separate object with a name, beginning and conclusion. Here the composition must be crossed as one territory. The display advances through time, but it offers no semantic map of where one currently stands. The listener may remember that the work has changed enormously while being unable to identify the exact point at which one environment became another.

This uncertainty creates a powerful form of temporal disorientation. A listener checking the elapsed time may be surprised to discover that only twelve minutes have passed, or that forty minutes have disappeared without producing an orderly sequence of remembered events. The piece expands and compresses time according to attention. Harsh passages can feel physically prolonged, while dense transitional sections erase their own duration. The clock remains precise; experience does not.

The phrase “or disappear” gradually changes meaning within this structure. At first it sounds like a threat of physical or psychological collapse. Continue without sleep and the self will be destroyed. Yet disappearance also describes what happens when attention becomes absorbed deeply enough that the ordinary listener briefly recedes. One stops categorizing every event, loses the need to distinguish instrument from processing, and enters the composition as pressure. The self disappears not through annihilation but through temporary release from constant interpretation.

This possibility prevents the work from being merely punitive. Its abrasiveness is genuine, but violence is not the only experience available within it. Certain sustained regions possess a strange calm precisely because so much has already been surrendered. Once the listener stops demanding recognizable musical development, the dense sound can become an environment whose internal motion is almost sheltering. Terror and tranquility are not placed at opposite ends. They occupy the same frequency field, separated by the listener’s changing resistance.

Kevin Drumm’s work has often demonstrated this doubleness. A drone may feel like an enormous empty room or like a crushing weight from which escape is impossible. The physical sound can remain nearly identical while interpretation moves between refuge and confinement. Reconquer Sleep or Disappear adds Smith’s editorial instability to that condition, ensuring that neither reading remains secure. Just as one begins settling into the field, another fracture opens.

The composition’s long gestation also complicates the usual mythology of spontaneous extremity. Noise is often imagined as immediate discharge, a direct eruption of rage, instinct or electrical accident. This piece was built across years. Its apparent chaos is the product of extraordinary patience, repeated return and precise selection. The violence has been revised. The disorder has undergone administration. Every cut and density decision belongs to a process much slower than the events it produces.

There is something almost architectural in this labor. Smith did not merely arrange a sequence of sounds. He constructed corridors, false walls, sealed rooms and sudden openings from recordings made under different circumstances. Drumm’s tones function as load-bearing material, but they are repeatedly bent, obscured or placed under pressures that alter their apparent mass. The completed work resembles a building designed from the rubble of several previous buildings, structurally coherent even though no single original plan explains it.

Weasel Walter’s mastering contributes another important layer. Walter’s own work repeatedly occupies the region where technical precision meets maximal physical disorder. Mastering a piece this dense is not simply a matter of making it louder. The challenge is preserving distinctions within saturation, allowing high-frequency detail, low pressure and abrupt transient events to remain active without reducing the entire work to one flattened rectangle. The final sound must feel overwhelming while still permitting its internal fractures to be heard.

The cover’s safety glass becomes an especially useful analogy for this mastering. Tempered glass breaks into many small pieces rather than a few long blades, reducing one form of danger by distributing the fracture across the whole surface. Reconquer Sleep or Disappear distributes its violence similarly. There may be sudden attacks, but the deepest instability exists everywhere. The entire sonic pane has become granular. Every sustained region contains potential cutting edges.

The artwork also suggests frozen motion. Shattered glass records an event that occurred too quickly for human vision to follow. The impact is over, but its energy remains legible in the branching pattern. Sound normally disappears after its vibration ends. Recording allows the impact to remain suspended, repeatable at any hour. This album preserves not one event but several years of impacts, rearranged into a fracture pattern that can be activated again whenever the file begins.

That repeatability raises a question about endurance. The musicians and listener cannot remain indefinitely inside the conditions represented here, but the recording can. It does not become fatigued, frightened or desensitized. The 434.89 MB archive waits on a drive with perfect patience, prepared to reconstruct fifty-three minutes of psychic emergency each time it is opened. Digital preservation gives exhaustion an inexhaustible body.

This makes the piece particularly resonant within a large archive. A file may sit untouched for years, appearing as little more than an artist name, date, title and size. Its internal time remains folded shut. When played, an entire historical process unfolds: five cities, several years of recording, two artists’ incompatible methods, Smith’s long editorial labor and Walter’s final mastering decisions. The folder is small enough to overlook, yet the world inside it is hostile to casual attention.

Reconquer Sleep or Disappear is not ideal background music because it continually interferes with whatever background status the listener assigns it. Played quietly, its spectral detail can leak into the room and become indistinguishable from electrical or environmental sound. Played loudly, it turns the room into an instrument and forces the body to register pressure before the mind has decided what the sound means. Either level alters the listener’s sense of surrounding space.

Movement through the room may reveal different parts of the composition, much as it did with Phill Niblock’s massed guitars earlier in this sequence. But Niblock’s frequencies create a relatively stable architecture whose internal mix changes with physical position. Smith and Drumm build an architecture that is itself being cut apart while the listener walks through it. One cannot determine whether a newly audible tone was revealed by moving, introduced by the composition, or imagined through auditory adaptation.

The transition from Niblock through The Black Dog to this release forms an extraordinary three-part investigation of sustained consciousness. Niblock demonstrates that an apparently unchanging tone is full of acoustic motion. The Black Dog demonstrates that an apparently quiet night is full of neurological and social disturbance. Smith and Drumm bring those discoveries into open conflict, producing a condition where acoustic density and exhausted consciousness become nearly inseparable.

Yet Reconquer Sleep or Disappear refuses the elegance associated with many minimalist or ambient investigations. Its materials are scarred, abrasive and frequently grotesque. It does not offer the listener a tasteful vantage point from which to contemplate altered perception. The listener is placed inside the alteration. The work does not say, “Observe how consciousness changes.” It changes the conditions under which observation is possible.

The grotesque is important to Tom Smith’s aesthetic because it resists the purification of experimental music into refined abstraction. Sound may be intellectually sophisticated and still feel sweaty, humiliating, excessive or physically wrong. The body does not disappear simply because recognizable rhythm and melody have been removed. It returns through stress, breath, tension, fatigue and the instinct to recoil.

Drumm’s contribution prevents that grotesque energy from becoming pure theatrical expression. His denser and slower materials possess an impersonal authority, as though the human drama is occurring inside a much larger electrical weather system that does not care about it. Smith’s cuts may seem frantic, but the underlying pressure continues. The individual can thrash against the environment without changing its scale.

This is where the title reaches its most severe interpretation. Sleep is the last daily disappearance through which the self survives. Conscious control ends, but the body repairs, memory reorganizes and another day becomes possible. To lose sleep is to lose the safe form of disappearance, leaving only the destructive kind. The album offers a forced substitute: disappear into sound, or remain outside it and endure the full pressure of resisting.

There is no conventional resolution at the end because sleep cannot be represented through a triumphant final chord. The piece eventually stops, but stopping is not the same as arrival. The room reappears around the listener. Household sound, traffic and electrical hum regain their ordinary status, though they may feel temporarily altered by the preceding density. Silence becomes noticeable as a material rather than an absence.

The album’s deepest achievement is its refusal to make extremity simple. Loudness is not automatically violence; quietness is not automatically relief. Continuity can become claustrophobic, while fracture can briefly restore orientation. Total density may produce calm, and a nearly empty frequency field may generate dread. Smith and Drumm understand that perception is relational. The same sound becomes different when the listener’s resistance, fatigue or location changes.

Reconquer Sleep or Disappear is therefore not only a noise collaboration or an electroacoustic endurance work. It is a study of what remains of identity when continuity and interruption are both made unreliable. The music shatters time but does not let the pieces fall away. Like the glass on its cover, everything remains connected through damage.

The work may not help anyone sleep. It offers something less comforting and perhaps more useful: a precise external form for the state in which rest has become impossible, thought is fragmenting, and the body continues demanding surrender. For fifty-three minutes, that private condition becomes architecture. The listener can enter it, move through it and eventually leave.

The command in the title remains unanswered. Sleep has not been conquered, and disappearance has not been defeated. But the territory between them has been mapped with extraordinary ferocity.